July 25, 2011

Who will determine what counts as "junk food" and what the appropriate tax rate is? How will the government make sure people are not evading the tax by making their own junk food at home or buying it in the black market? Is it fair or efficient to make lean, healthy people pay a premium for cookies, ice cream, and potato chips because other consumers do not exercise enough to burn off the calories they ingest? Don't worry, Bittman says: "We have experts who can figure out how 'bad' a food should be to qualify, and what the rate should be."

Here's an idea: let the citizens eat whatever they want, and then let them be responsible for the deleterious effects on their health later in life. The problem of spiraling healthcare costs and meddlesome governments are both takenn care or fairly quickly. Of course, smart guys like our NY Times editorialist dont get to exercise his brilliance for all of society, but we'll adjust okay.

Well, we should all recognize that the problem with the Constitution is that it's a charter of negative liberties, and that it says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government MUST do you on your behalf.

"The left and the right share one great love: using the power of the State to enforce their vision of personal morality, for "the common good". Ever thus, I'm afraid."

This is the caricature of the right. The only people who really try to "enforce their vision of personal morality" are social "conservatives" many of whom are not very conservative at all. The libertarian right is what the tea parties are about.

Stuff like gay marriage is about forcing other people to endorse your choices. I have no problem with the NY law because it protects the churches from harassment by the gay activists who want everyone to participate in those psychiatrist gay sons' weddings.

Rick Perry startled a lot of people the other day by saying he was in favor of the NY law.

Technology can solve this. Since how "bad" a food is depends on our own individual metabolism, body chemistry, what else we've eaten that day, etc., people will be required to go through a full body "health scan" to access the proper tax on any food they are about to eat. And, to prevent avoidance of the tax, no one will be allowed to prepare their own food.

Just think of all the resources our society will save by not having to build and supply kitchens in every home and apartment? It'll be much more efficient for us to consolidate all food preparation into government built and supplied food preparation centers -- think school cafeterias for everyone! Why should the rich eat better than the rest of us? Food's as much a right as healthcare!

Of course, once we start to live in this utopia, we won't need health scanners to properly access the tax on our food choices. The helpful and friendly staff at the food preparation centers will fill our plates with what's good for us (and make sure we eat it).

There are a lot of things that cost "society" money. Fat people and potato chips is just one. How about blow hards with guns, backyard athletes throwing out a back and volvo driving yuppies running a red light. Its funny how just certain select behaviors make the cut in the Nanny State.

The ongoing govt power grab at every level of our society reminds me of this graph:

"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.” – Robert A. Heinlein

Oh just perfect...Google wants my phone number to "safeguard" my account access in the future. Fuck them and the jackass they rode in on.

Actually we needn't worry too much about Mark Bittman and health Nazis like him. Obama has ripped the mask off "Progressivism" allowing it's ugly and incompetent face to show through. For that Obama deserves some thanks at least.

By the time America is ready to listen to this trash more than two minutes Bittman will need Poli-Grip and orthopedic shoes.

Um...Debit cards already track consumer purchases for marketing purposes and the govt rejects non-approved purchases on their debit cards...so it isn't that much of a stretch to see certain foods or goods taxed or rationed at the point of purchase.

Hell's bells. This garbage, right after Sci Am published a debunking of most of the last 20 years of scientific & government wisdom about salt consumption? (Not that I have much respect for Sci Am anymore.) And how many times has the food "pyramid" been rearranged in my lifetime?What this really is, is a government employee's union full-employment scheme for the type of people who can't get a productive job.

I ran five miles yesterday and five todayvsobthat i can eat wtf i want to eat. I would prefer we tax people by the pound. We could retire our debt in no time. Fat fuckers crowding me in airplanes, everywhere! Dont tax their food tax their gross fattiness. Double tax the fucking fat poor for adding stupid to their other miseries

Ht. No, exercise does not make you lose weight, but it does curb the appetite and introduces the very unusual concept of dpself discipline into ones life. People are fat because they eat too much. Period.

But who will supervise such a program? The govt employees i have observed are fat as shit. Surely we arent going to have a bunch of fat asses working in the bureau that will be established to promulgate this idiotic idea in every town and hamlet in the land. They cant find enough fit people to run a program!

These are presumably the same experts who told us that fat made us fat and we should all eat pasta, until it turned out to be the other way around. And that dietary salt caused all kinds of terrible things, which per Scientific American doesn't seem to be supported by, like, evidence.

Bitumen has built his argument on the costs of healthcare to society. So I must ask - when are we going to start regulating sex again? Sex probably causes more health problems than food. Gay sex and HIV anyone?

Nothing new here. Liberal fascists just imitating the fascism of 1930s (Stalinist-style) Soviet, Italian, German regimes. Who got their inspiration from the Jewish Bolshevik theoreticians. Who got their inspiration from the 1848 Commune and the Jacobites.

And maybe Breivik and other soon to be violent conservatives seeing fascist solutions needed to prevent Muslims from taking over Europe will see their fascist solutions inspired by Bittman and others of the Fascist Left.

Experts have been telling us to load up on bread products. They've told us that eating saturated fat and cholesterol will give us unhealthy lipid profiles. As has been mentioned, they told us to cut salt.

Basically the supposed experts in this field have no idea what they're talking about, so even apart from the obvious fascistic nature of this, it's stupid.

Worse, the ad tried to say that a guy who works down the hall from you could be one of the guys struggling with hunger. Right. Some guy in your office building is starving. He gets a paycheck, but somehow he doesn't ever get around to buying food. What is he supposed to be buying before that? Or is he supposed to be some poor person who's been enslaved and receives no remuneration? In that case, I think slavery should be the bigger issue with an ad about it.

If only he could have restrained himself to minimalism. Just let the government get out of the subsidizing business. But no, he believes "the federal government [should fullfill] its role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix."

This is called throwing good money after bad.

But Bittman is impatient. He writes, "the food industry appears incapable of marketing healthier foods..." It's as if Whole Foods doesn't exist. It's as if a food writer named Mark Bittman (any relation?) can't get an audience. Forget those losers. Let's get the government involved. What could go wrong?

Freeman, what's sad is the fact that my school district as well as many others offers free breakfast and lunch Mondays through Thursdays all summer long because some children on free and reduced price lunches "wouldn't get to eat" if the gubmint didn't offer this.

I would venture to say that many of those children could be eating breakfast and lunch at home if their parents made better choices about what to spend money on.

@kimsch -- At my kid's school the free breakfast (for all kids) often features donuts. My son is always impatient for the bus to arrive so he doesn't miss out. Luckily he has a metabolism like a spider monkey.

@freeman -- All day. All day you've been on fire. Great comments in the brain post.

Also, let's face it, Bittman and others' belief that healthy food is too expensive comes partially from their total alienation from the non-rich. They go to places like Whole Foods, and think, "My God, how could poor people ever afford this!" It never occurs to them to check the prices at Walmart.

It's more than that. Little-known work by Denis Burkitt in Africa nearly 40 years ago strongly suggests that measuring caloric "intake" by the caloric value of what you put in your mouth and swallow is wrong. IIRC, he found that 40% of the calories swallowed by British soldiers he studied were never absorbed (and thus were never actually eaten in the common understanding of the term; what goes down your throat isn't in your body, yet). 60% of the calories swallowed by nearby native Africans exited in the feces. So substantial amounts of the calories you eat never get into your body, and the amount that does get absorbed can vary considerably. Until these issues are fully addressed neither counting calories nor assessing the types of food eaten will allow for a truly comprehensive understanding of diet and nutrition.

Is it that people are starving or have hunger issues? One in 6 seems too high. But as for who they are, maybe they're seniors. It's not like you are going to stumble upon a community and see hunger all presented to you nice and neat and easy to see.

I'm one of those one in six who struggle with hunger. It's called dieting. I think the number is actually higher than one in six. There are fat people, and people who go to bed hungry...In the course of my lifetime, many behaviors have changed. People didn't use to routinely buckle up their seat belts. Cigarette smoking has become verboten in most places. When I was a kid, they used to allow smoking everywhere except church. (There was a smoker's Mass at 6pm.) Public intoxication is not often seen, and there seem to be more coffee houses than bars around town. Demonstrably behavior does change. I would guess a certain amount of judicious nagging by the government is partially responsible for these changes, but who really knows. Right now heavy drinking is more unfashionable than during Prohibition. Thus, whatever caused that behavior to change didn't come from the government.....Look around. The besetting vice of Americans is gluttony. Every third person you see is morbidly obese, and their lives look burdensome and painful. OK, obesity is caused more by free will than by MacDonald's, but just publicizing the problem makes people pause and reconsider their food choices.

As I said to someone on the Reason thread who insisted that you couldn't make a meal from stuff at the grocery store w/o HFCS or trans fats, I described a meal I made last week [I inadvertently left out a couple of ingredients there]:

"Nice, but for many thousands of years most people were nof fat. What happened here in the last thirty years that made things different. What nuanve am i missing"

I'm not sure it's safe to say that people were not fat for many thousands of years, and that it's changed in the past 30. If I allow the assumption that people were thin for all of human history until very recently, the explanation could be as simple as for most of human history people have barely eked out a living. They simply couldn't acquire enough calories to become overweight.

But things are seldom that simple when it comes to living organisms. There are obvious things that can be accepted as true regarding human diet. All other things being equal, caloric intake and physical activity do generally correlate with body weight. But there are many exceptions. My point was that the exceptions may occur because our understanding of material and energy balances for human bodies has been based on a flawed model (calories eaten=calories absorbed; any chemical engineering student, given an understanding of the digestive system, would see the problem with this, and Burkitt's research provides hard evidence of it). Part of the problem is precisely that little is known beyond Burkitt's research (I've done the literature search, and unless I've missed something then it might be accurate to say that nothing is known beyond Burkitt's work). Any nutritionists reading this that can give me some references where additional work has been done on caloric content of feces, please do so. I'm genuinely curious, and not in a Titus way.

Our family has always been on the lower part of the middle class financially. My husband was significantly unemployed for quite a while way back when. I was working part time. 3 kids.

(One time in recent years I was asking one of my [now grown] kids about the demogaphics in the school at the time -- about whether she was aware of "poor" kids. "Mom," she said. "We were poor." Oops.)

But anyway -- we never went hungry. We didn't eat fancy. We didn't eat junk. No potato chips. No ice cream. No soda. The kids always ate breakfast AT HOME. We never missed a mortgage payment, phone bill, or light bill. We didn't have food stamps.

We weren't sad. We didn't feel deprived. It was tough times. We lived on what we made and paid our bills first and ate macaroni and cheese and all beef hot dogs and cheap chicken if we had to.

No one in our family is or was obese. Neither were we emaciated.

We didn't need the federal government to fix us.

I look around, and yes, there are people who are hurting -- in our area they utilize the food bank at the local Baptist church -- but like Freeman, I wonder if the 1 in 6 (and I live in Appalachia -- albeit not Kentucky) are in a van down by the river.

Is it that people are starving or have hunger issues? One in 6 seems too high. But as for who they are, maybe they're seniors. It's not like you are going to stumble upon a community and see hunger all presented to you nice and neat and easy to see.

Only 13% of the population is over age 65. Even if every single senior were starving, that wouldn't be enough. Additionally, the poverty rate of people over 65 is 10-20% depending on how you measure it.

Also, let's face it, Bittman and others' belief that healthy food is too expensive comes partially from their total alienation from the non-rich. They go to places like Whole Foods, and think, "My God, how could poor people ever afford this!"

Seriously. Frozen veggies are so, so cheap. (as are bananas and any fruits and veggies that are in season) So much cheaper than potato chips. I always spend more when I buy junk food than when I buy healthy stuff.

What is expensive is alaskan wild salmon and organic out of season papayas, and although those things are nice, you don't need them to eat good food. Canned salmon and in season peaches are just as healthy.